James Philip
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WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
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Timeline 10/27/62 – BOOK FIFTEEN
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2020. All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
The Timeline 10/27/62 Series
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Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
Book 11: 1966 & All That
Book 12: Only in America
Book 13: Warsaw Concerto
Book 14: Eight Miles High
Book 15: Won’t get Fooled Again
A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novel
Football in the Ruins – The World Cup of 1966
Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novella
A Kelper’s Tale
Cuba Libre
The House on Haight Street
La Argentina
Puerto Argentino
Coming in 2020-21
Book 16: Armadas (2020)
Book 17: Smoke on the Water (2021)
Book 18: Cassandra’s Song (2021)
USA Series
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
Book 2: Operation Manna
For the latest news and author blogs about the
Timeline 10/27/62 Series check out
www.thetimelinesaga.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Prologue
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Epilogue
Author’s End Note
Other Books by James Philip
WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
[Book Fifteen of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series]
‘Shikata ga nai.’
Translation: ‘Nothing can be helped.’
A traditional Japanese saying.
‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely, they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’
Abraham Lincoln
[the final words of his first Inauguration
speech on Monday 4th March 1861]
Chapter 1
Prologue
When the delegates to the supposedly ‘failed’ rededication of the United Nations made their way home from California in the spring of 1967, many concluded that the world was still broken.
In many ways, it was, of course.
However, that was to ignore what was staring everybody in the face: for all that the pre-October War international system self-evidently lay in the charred ruins of the cataclysm, in those bad-tempered, profoundly unsatisfactory sessions on board the USS United States and in the hotels and on the university campuses, in the restaurants and in unpublicised casual meetings in the public parks of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, diplomats and politicians of every ideological and theocratic hue had actually met, and talked to each other in significant numbers for the first time in well over four years. Publicly, the sessions on the USS United States had been a slow motion car wreck; elsewhere in the Bay Area, the future foundations of a more rational global geopolitical framework had been established, albeit one which was not immediately apparent to either observers, or participants. However, jaw jaw had, for the first time since that dreadful day late in October 1962, threatened to supplant war war, as the dominant mode of planetary resolution settlement between the two main protagonists of the October War, and that, is probably why humanity remains extant on Earth over half-a-decade later.
Inevitably, there were a lot of ghosts in the machine and it took several years to shake these free of their chains. Nobody has ever managed to abolish war, and the fact that the disorderly San Francisco ‘colloquium’ – as scholars now categorise that first attempt to revive the United Nations – appeared, at the time, and in the decade that followed, unable to decisively press the reset button for peace, ignores a deeper reality. Namely, that afterwards, a given nation state’s failure to resort to diplomacy as the default option for the settlement of international disputes, increasingly resulted in that country earning pariah status in the eyes of the world community.
It is too readily forgotten that post-San Francisco, all the main players – the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and its New Commonwealth allies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, liberated France and the slumbering future giants, the Peoples Republic of China and India – were, as we would say now, ‘on message’, and for the first time since 1945 the real and present danger of a new World War began, at last, to recede.
Ironically, this new reality was to be obscured by the aberrations of regimes struggling to, or pathologically incapable of recognising that they were no longer operating in the nightmare of the post-cataclysm world; forgetting that they too, had act
ually signed up to a new, better, more rational post-war world order at San Francisco. We ought not to be surprised that for leaders who had guided their peoples through a terrible vale of tears since October 1962, it was very hard to break out of the mindset which had given them the strength to carry on, and to embrace the idea that peace could, and ought to be the new normal. They were prisoners of their past, scared and traumatised by their experiences and in many cases, haunted by the awful choices they had had to make to ensure their nation’s survival; and while they remained in power the hold of that past, could not but colour their decisions going forward.
Notwithstanding, 1967 was the year in which Mankind began again to look to the future, to gaze up to the stars and contemplate anew, its destiny.
1967 was also the year that the world sat down and counted the cost.
To this day there is no universal consensus about the human cost of the war to end all wars. Suffice it to say that the population of the globe in October 1962, somewhere in the region of 3.2 billion, did not recover sufficiently to exceed that level until around mid-2003. It is estimated that between three hundred and four hundred million people died in the period 27th October and 31st December 1962, and between five hundred and eight hundred million as a consequence of the war’s ‘after effects’, mostly the spread of disease, starvation and societal factors related to the temporary breakdown of modern civilisation, and the knock on effects on the global farming, industrial and trading system.
Most history books quote a figure of around eight hundred million deaths classified as ‘directly attributable’ to the war but this number is almost certainly conservative, customarily applying only to the period October 1962 to December 1963, and must be regarded with suspicion because of the statistical methodology it employs to account for the toll of global pandemics – so-called ‘War Plagues’ – and the long-term effects of the massively increased level of ionising radiation in the environment. For example, nobody in India died during the actual war but pestilence and famine directly caused by the war, the cutting off of external grain supplies and the supply of ‘western’ pharmaceuticals, and long interruptions in the availability of other vital industrial and commercial raw materials – like oil, for example – and vital high specification technological components, probably caused the deaths of tens of millions of Indians outside the big cities, effectively halting the growth in the general population for nearly thirty years.
Chinese historians put the People’s Republic’s war dead at around sixty million but assert that at least as many died in the years immediately after the conflict, again, mainly from famine and disease, and acknowledge that the ‘die off’ continued well into the latter 1970s and early 1980s because of the Communist Party’s botched agrarian reforms, and the crippling economic effects of its refusal to come to an accommodation with the United States over the ‘Taiwan Question.’
Of the three ‘nuclear’ powers involved in the October War, the United States had escaped relatively lightly, albeit still suffering at least twenty million deaths as a result of the war, and its aftermath of atrocity and wholesale violence in the Midwest. Its pre-war population of around one hundred-and-eighty-three million had sunk to one-hundred-and-sixty-nine million at the time of the 1971 Census; but had recovered – partially due to immigration from Central and Latin America, and the ‘baby boom of the 1970s – to October 1962 levels ten years later.
In the United Kingdom over a third of the pre-war population of England of some forty-three million, died on the night of the war and subsequently, as many as five to six million died prematurely, directly as a consequence of hostilities and disease in the following decade. Even today, over half-a-century later, the population of the United Kingdom has still not recovered to its October 1962 level of nearly fifty-three million, seemingly having ‘stuck’ at around forty-six million between the 2001 and 2011 Censuses as the long-term effects of raised background radiation levels continued to impact life expectancy, resulting in average life spans some ten years shorter for both men and women, than would have been predicted by pre-1962 demographic trends.
The Soviet Union, arguably the most culpable of the ‘nuclear powers’, suffered – proportionately - most grievously. Perhaps, one in every two of the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics died on the night, and in days following the war, and conceivably, over thirty, possibly forty million more of their countrymen and women in the winter that followed. The devastation was so widespread, and in many regions so comprehensive, that it was well over a year before what was left of the Soviet leadership meaningfully established what, exactly, remained of their country’s peoples, industry, agriculture and military might.
Many contemporary historians regard the bellicosity of the first – Brezhnev-Kosygin-Chuikov regime - post-war Soviet government as being akin to a communal psychotic episode, a pattern of lashing out more in despair than anger, and in retrospect, this perhaps, may be the best explanation for why the Brezhnev Troika frittered away most of what was left of the Red Army and Air Force in a quixotic attempt to conquer Iran and Iraq in 1964 in pursuit of new tracts of uncontaminated land, and the oil riches of the Middle East.
Historians sometimes tear their hair out trying to understand events which, to a rational mind, are inexplicable. Sometimes, we just have to admit that great events are explicable only in the context of contemporary mass psychosis masquerading as grand strategy.
In the Soviet Union over ninety percent of the fifty-eight million people of the republics of the western USSR - the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and of the western and northern Ukraine, and the whole of Belorussia – perished in the first phase of the war and even ten years later, it was said by travellers in this region that one might drive from Berlin to Moscow, a journey of over a thousand miles, through these lands without encountering a living soul.
Even today, these sparsely-populated territories form the re-mapped republics of the great ‘dead zone’ of Central Europe.
More generally, across the NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – Member countries, studies undertaken a decade later established that extant populations had declined between October 1962 and December 1972 as follows: Austria, to 3.1 million in 1972 (from a 1962 population of 7.1 million), Belgium, 2.2 (9.2), Denmark 2.8 (4.6), France 15.4 (46.5), Greece 3.4 (8.4), Holland 0.8 (11.4), Italy 30.1 (50.4), Norway 2.5 (3.6), Sweden 5.6 (7.5), Turkey 5.9 (27.8), the Federal Republic of Germany, that is, West Germany 4.7 (54.4), and the United Kingdom 37.3 (52.8).
Even these figures mask only a part of the true cost: the 1972 populations of the Scandinavian countries, France and the United Kingdom were all artificially swollen – by approximately ten to fifteen percent - by refugees fleeing from the East, and in Britain’s case, well over two-and-a-half million immigrants from France, the Low Countries, and the Commonwealth.
The USSR’s Warsaw Pact partners had fared much worse. The statistics are truly mind-numbing, telling of whole nations reduced to giant, firestorm-ravaged bone fields.
Only Albania emerged from the war and the Balkan tragedies of its aftermath relatively untouched, its population only reduced by about a fifth from 1.6 million (to 1.3 million) ten years later. Other Soviet allies were less fortunate: Bulgaria 7.8 (to 3.8), Czechoslovakia 13.8 (to 5.8), East Germany 17.0 (to 0.6), Hungary 10.0 (to 4.8), Poland 29.7 (to 4.7), Romania 18.6 (to 11.5), and Yugoslavia 18.5 (to 3.2).
Populations had declined all around the world.
In the Iberian Peninsula the combined populations of Spain and Portugal (39.8 million in 1962) had fallen (to 37.1 ten years later). This was an effect mirrored as far away as Iceland, 180,000 (to 149,000), Switzerland, beset by famine in 1963 and 1964 from 5.4 million (to 4.2), in war-torn Cyprus 580,000 (to 177,000), Iran from 20.9 million (to 16.7), Iraq from 6.5 (to 2.9), and India from 439.3 (to 394.3). In Canada, although Soviet bombs targeting remote areas had caused relatively few direct casualties, subsequent radioactive contamination from
crash sites, and the overspill insurgency from the war in the American Midwest had contributed to a population decline from the 1962 high of 18.2 million, notwithstanding significant levels of Commonwealth and US immigration, to 17.8 million in 1972.
Regarded as something of a statistical outlier, in Europe the only country whose population actually rose between October 1962 and the end of December 1972, was Eire, the Irish Republic, from 2.8 to 2.9 million.
Continentally, the populations of North Africa fell by about eight percent in this period, and that of Sub-Saharan countries by eleven percent, mainly as a consequence of the withdrawal, or non-availability, of modern medicines, and diseases carried by famine-driven migrations. That said, the population statistics for Africa are problematic because the war occurred at a critical moment when European colonial powers, the United Kingdom in the lead, were fast divesting themselves of their overseas territories, and this transition would, of itself, have caused great dislocation to many of the newly independent states, even if there had not been the concurrent impacts of a catastrophic war in the northern hemisphere.
Although in Australasia populations increased by some seven percent over the decade, in Latin America, populations which had been rising faster than anywhere else in the world in the decade up to 1962 (excepting in parts of Asia), stagnated, and declined by an average of five percent across South America, as economies dependent on European markets and North American inward investment – and suddenly bereft of both – fell into hungry recession.
Not apparent at the time, the worst of the ‘global’ humanitarian crisis was over by 1967 but as in all generations, turning points which are recognised by observers fifty years later, are rarely so obvious to the people living through them. Moreover, modern generations forget too easily that our mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmother’s, were, in the 1960s, still living very much in the looming shadow of the war to end all wars.